Promotion

Peter Jackson on Mortal Engines

Peter Jackson is working on another film according to reports, and this is an adaptation of a series of books that also sound incredibly CG heavy, even more so than the Temeraire novels that he's working on, the books about the Napoleonic Wars that utilise dragons for air battles.

Mortal Engines (Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com) by Philip Reeve is a series of books about a post apocalyptic world where cities have been mechanised and are actually constantly on the move, seeking out new resources to consume and doing battle and consuming other cities to survive.

The cities are divided by class, but instead of suburbs stretching out from the centre, it's height that divides them with the rich living at the top amongst the riches of the city and the poor living in the bowels, ensuring that the city keeps running.

The story may well centre on the moving city of London which has St. Peter's Cathedral sitting atop the massive structure.

It sounds a superb series, and it appears that Peter Jackson has just bought the rights for the novels and plans to turn them into films, although not much is known about the treatment as yet.

According to The Dominion Post through /Film, Peter Jackson is secretly working on them and the project is "hush-hush". Ermm, I think that might be out the window with your very own report, not much secrecy in that now is there?

Apparently work on the adaptation of the first novel is underway already and Weta Workshops are building designs right now.

However, let's put a check on this and view it with some objectivity. Speaking in that director's round table that I wrote about the other day we heard Peter Jackson talking about how he liked to develop the scripts himself, paying for everything up until the point of trying to sell the developed project to a studio, this gave him better control and more chance of the project being sold.

Applying that to this project then it's fair to say that he'd have Weta working on concept designs to go along with a script treatment, or a complete script, that he would then present to studios in an effort to get funding and a green light. This project is some way off being a film, and there's still a fair possibility of it not being made.